Topic: Mac OS X 10.6

As part of Apple's plans to help trim the footprint of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the new system will cease the customary installation of several gigabytes of printer drivers and instead load only the files necessary for existing devices, relying on Software Update to obtain new drivers in the future as needed.

Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard operating system will include tools borrowed from the iPhone that let developers determine the geographical location of Macs, as well as extend additional support for multi-touch to their apps, AppleInsider has learned.

Apple this week has tapped a handful of choice developers to test third party application support against a new build of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in a sign the software is nearing a stage of refinement and optimization.

While Microsoft is working to refine its flagship operating system to be more palatable to a wide audience of PC users, Apple is working to keep Mac OS X a key attraction to Mac hardware to woo potential switchers and retain its loyal users. Here's what's known about Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

As the previous segment detailed, Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard aren't competing directly; instead, each is part of competitive strategy to either grow the Mac user base at Microsoft's expense, as Apple has been doing, or in Microsoft's case, to stop the hemorrhaging market share losses and reclaim leadership of desktop operating system development.

With the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple may be planning to rid its flagship operating system of the various user interface inconsistencies that have materialized in recent years, according to a pair of reports.

Imagination Technologies has posted a series of job openings for OpenCL engineers, indicating that the open, general purpose GPU parallelism technology Apple spearheaded for use in Mac OS X Snow Leopard is destined to also play a significant role in boosting embedded graphics and video acceleration on the company's future handheld products.

New evidence that Apple is the mysterious licensee of Imagination Technologies Group's PowerVR mobile graphics technology broke today, when the company publicly announced that Apple has subscribed to 8 million new shares of IMG, giving the iPhone maker a 3% stake in the firm. A press release also revealed Apple to be a licensee of Imagination's technology.

Apple's push to accelerate Mac performance in innovative ways is likely to bind the company even closer to NVIDIA's GPUs, which already support the OpenCL technology Apple will be releasing in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

NVIDIA, Apple's new MacBook chipset partner, is working hard to provide seamless support for OpenCL, the cross platform API Apple developed for Snow Leopard to create a vendor neutral, open specification for parallel programming across any compliant GPU.

Although there's been some evidence to suggest Snow Leopard could hit the market several months ahead of expectations, new information reveals that Apple remains heavily engaged in building out some of the features first previewed back in June.

Apple has reportedly set an industry record by moving its OpenCL parallel computing standard from its beginnings to imminent approval in half a year, paving the way for its inclusion in Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

Apple in its annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday outlined a number of new metrics on the company's business strategy, its retail operations, R&D investment, Snow Leopard-releated expenditures, worldwide operations, and more.

Build notes leaked on the web of a prerelease version of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard indicate that the software only supports enabling its new 64-bit kernel on certain machines, including the Xserve, Mac Pro, and MacBook Pro, but this does not mean Snow Leopard's kernel will be limited to 32-bit operation on consumer machines.